The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions

People have often tried to imagine what 9/11 would have been like if all of today’s technology would have been available back then. Well, what happened in Boston on Monday and the days since, gives us an idea. A huge flood of information in realtime, unfiltered. An outburst of speculation in realtime, unreflected. The event was by magnitudes smaller than 9/11, but the reaction has taught us a lesson: realtime is not how you make sense of things. So it might not come as a surprise that the best article on the topic began with: «There’s not much to say about Monday’s Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why.»